Book Review - The Quiet Millionaire
The Quiet Millionaire is a book that contains a wealth of information on personal finance topics. With forty plus years of professional experience as a personal and business financial advisor, Brett Wilder shares with us his expertise on how to accumulate and keep our wealth.
This book’s theme is tied very closely to the title of the book – The Quiet Millionaire. Instead of writing about how to be frugal or the secret to picking the right stock at the right time, this book focuses on how the average population can carefully plan and be a millionaire with time, patience and good probability.
One of the first Brett advices is to discover who the real you is and what you really want out of life, while making sure we plan for money to be our servant instead of being our master.
Next, he explains to us the seven major obstacles to Financial Success:1. Undisciplined Spending2. Materialistic Thinking3. Burdensome Costly Debt4. Taxes5. Inflation6. Poorly Structured Investment Portfolios7. Unforeseen Life-Changing, Financially Devastating EventsThis sets up the rest of the book where he tackles all sorts of topics such as cash flow, investing, taxes, and retirement.
Cash FlowThe key to having a positive cash flow involves knowing where our money is going. This includes creating a budget, in which personal finance software such as Quicken or Microsoft Money can help. Other tips include having a plan to determine cash flow requirements to fund future goals and objectives and paying ourselves first with automatic savings deductions.
InvestingBrett is a big advocate of low cost index funds. He believes in the long run, most people will end up leaving money on the table by trading individual stocks because many of us let our emotions get in the way. This is great advice for so many people because this totally takes the maintenance work required for stock picking out of the equation and just let the money work for us.
TaxesIn order to minimize taxes paid, we should actively plan for tax reductions. This means proactively perform intelligent tax reduction to maximize our after-tax dollars throughout the entire year.
RetirementOnce we retire, the primary focus should be to protect and preserve our wealth instead of trying to accumulate and grow it. One of the advices given is to establish a lifetime gift-giving program to reduce the value of his/her estate and transfer it to someone else over time without incurring taxes.
Target AudienceThe book is for people who have a good income stream and would like the extra help to accumulate and keep their wealth through time. People looking for the secret to getting rich quickly are not going to find what they are looking for in this book.
Last WordsFrom the cover and title to the content, this book is about substance. There is nothing fancy in this book, just straight forward personal finance information that we can all benefit.
